


new york is the ocean (and the ocean is bleedin' salt)

by defcontwo



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: F/F, M/M, Multi, Non-Linear Narrative
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-03
Updated: 2014-10-03
Packaged: 2018-02-19 16:33:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2395244
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/defcontwo/pseuds/defcontwo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is 1970, and ten minutes and however many blocks ago, Rebecca Barnes looked across the street and out of the corner of her eye, saw a man ascending from the U-Bahn and set off down the street. He had on a dark coat and he walked with a deep, heavy weight to his gait, a swagger with no joy in it, and for all that he walked with his head down, she saw enough to be sure, in that moment so completely dead certain, that he wore her brother's face. </p><p>The trouble is, James Buchanan Barnes has been dead for twenty-six years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	new york is the ocean (and the ocean is bleedin' salt)

It is 1970 and Rebecca Barnes stands on a street corner in West Berlin, lungs gasping for breath, the lights of the Kurfürstendamm burning bright in her vision, coloring the snow and wind that falls swiftly all around her, casting everything in a weak, sickly glow. 

She blinks her eyes once, twice, snowflakes coating her eyelashes and she peers out at the street, eyes seeking out every nook and cranny, but the vision before her looks like something out of a dream and only now, standing here, does she begin to doubt what she had convinced herself of with such clarity ten minutes ago. 

"Forty-four years old and chasing ghosts," Becca mutters to herself, "you'd think you'd know better by now," she says, ducking into a shopfront overhang and digging into her pockets for a crumpled pack of Marlboros, bringing a cigarette up to her lips but her fingers shake, from the cold, from the adrenaline, from that brief, tenuous gasp of hope so easily snuffed out and it takes a passing stranger with a lighter to get her cigarette lit. She shuffles off with a brief, half-hearted "danke," wanting nothing more than to be as far away as possible from this fucking country, every face she passes on the walk back to her hotel a blank, grey nothingness. 

It doesn't matter. None of them are the face she wants to see. 

The face she could've sworn she just saw. 

It is 1970, and ten minutes and however many blocks ago, Rebecca Barnes looked across the street and out of the corner of her eye, saw a man ascending from the U-Bahn and set off down the street. He had on a dark coat and he walked with a deep, heavy weight to his gait, a swagger with no joy in it, and for all that he walked with his head down, she saw enough to be sure, in that moment so completely dead certain, that he wore her brother's face. 

The trouble is, James Buchanan Barnes has been dead for twenty-six years. 

. 

They make movies about the war, now. Cover it up with sepia and nostalgia, set bold words to sweeping speeches and call it done. 

A sweetheart stands at the window every day, waiting for her soldier to come home. A mother sits at the kitchen table and weeps. There is a macabre fascination with the death of a soldier, with the fallout of loss and the trappings of grief. 

But there was no sweetheart, no mother. 

Just her. 

Her mother, weak from pneumonia and heartsick with news of family a whole world away that she was powerless to help, with Pop so newly in the ground, passed quietly in the night while the twins slept on through it all. It was Becca who found her mother -- the body, at just past 3 in the morning when she got up to get a glass of water, still as a statue on the couch and cold to the touch. 

She wants to fight it when her father's family comes in from Indiana to take the twins away, has to clench her fists and bite back a snarl at the curl of their lips, the disdain that they've always leveled at her mother (and at Bucky and herself as a consequence, for being just like her) but she is seventeen years old and barely making enough to keep herself afloat, let alone herself plus two six year olds. 

She pulls Miriam and Ethel close and hugs them real tight, whispers in their ears that this is only temporary, that it's just until Bucky and Steve make it back from the war and then the three of them, they'll figure something out. 

The words sound like a lie even as they fall from her lips. 

A month later, Becca turns 18 and walks straight down to the nearest WAC recruitment office. 

. 

They send her to the Philippines and it is not bad work, it is useful and necessary and good but there is sweat dripping down her back, the day the news comes, the day a small cadre of servicemen stop in front of the tent where she is sorting equipment, all somber expressions and smart, heavy suits that are ill-fitting in this climate. There was a ravine, they say, a ravine and a train and too much snow. Missing in action, they say, but it is missing presumed dead and as the midday sun beats into her back, Becca has never felt further from her brother than in that very moment, the moment when she learned of his death. 

They tell her that she screamed, after. A silent, hoarse desperate scream that tore itself out of her, but she cannot, for the life of her, remember this. 

. 

The same men come for her one week later, hangdog expressions and genuine sorrow in their eyes, but she stops them in their stead, holding up a hand. 

It's not hard to put two and two together. She is the only one left that Steve Rogers could possibly hope to call kin. 

"There's no need, boys," Becca says, straightening her spine and forcing her voice to hold itself steady. "This one, I saw coming." 

. 

She has more memories of her brother than she can possibly write down in any book; she is fit to bursting with seventeen years of half-smirks and skinned knees and warm, tight hugs that made her feel like there was nothing in the world that could ever get at her. 

But the best one, Becca knows, is this: 

It's the first time Bucky's been home to Brooklyn since his draft number first came up in November of '40. His time away with the Army is the longest she's ever gone without seeing him and when he walks through their front door for the first time since leaving, uniform as neat as a pin and hat perched on his head just-so, she practically flies across the room and right into his arms. He holds her close and whirls her around the room, her feet just barely touching the floor, before finally setting her back down. 

"You're getting too big, Becca-Girl, what am I gonna do with myself when you're all grown and too important for your big brother?" 

"I'm already too important for you, Buck, where've you been," Becca had said, chin-upturned and voice as self-assured as any fourteen year old girl could hope to be.

He sneaks her into a bar that night, a Brooklyn Heights mainstay that he and Steve've been frequenting for years and she's the only one who knows that, a secret that she's proud to hold onto tight. He swings her around the dance floor with impeccable footwork and ridiculous, exaggerated gestures, telling outlandish stories about Basic that can't possibly be true while Steve watches on from the bar with a beer and a fond grin. 

"Can you believe this lump," Bucky says, as they circle ever closer to the bar, waiting until they're just close enough to be within Steve's earshot. "Hates the idea of dancing so much that I gotta resort to dancing with my baby sister." 

"Fuck off, Buck," Steve says good-naturedly, even as Becca stomps on her brother's left foot more out of obligation than spite, and Bucky pretends to wipe away tears from his eyes when he hops up onto the barstool to order them drinks, a beer for him and a soda for her. 

"And to think here I was gonna say that I'd missed you two more than anything," Bucky says, "and look how you treat me. Must be something wrong with me." 

Becca catches Steve's eye and they both smile. Becca likes Steve a lot; Ma and Pop, they aren't so sure, but for Becca, Steve's like an extension of Bucky, a second brother that she didn't ask for but can't bring herself to regret for a moment. 

Steve shrugs. "You're right. Must be something wrong with you." 

"I've been tryin' to tell Ma that for years," Becca says, voice dropping into a conspiratorial tone. 

"Ungrateful assholes," Bucky grumbles, without rancor, before suddenly grabbing hold of Steve's hand and dragging him out on the dance floor amidst loud squawks of protest. 

Bucky makes sure to sneak her back into the house before midnight, yawning through her wide, bright smile and just this side of wired from all of the soda, just enough so that she knows she probably won't get near enough sleep tonight as to make tomorrow's day of school palatable but all the same, she can't help herself from peeking out the window and watching the two of them as they make their way down the street together. 

Their conversation is low, muffled, but Steve's deep baritone is unmistakable and whatever he said, it must've been good, must've been funny because Bucky stops stock still in the middle of the street at it. He stands there, figure outlined by a streetlamp and face awash with the glow of the light, and throws his head back and laughs like he's got his whole life ahead of him to stand there and do exactly that. 

Later, Becca will realize that she'd never seen her brother happier than he was in that moment. 

. 

Becca returns to that bar, after. 

It is 1946 and she is twenty going on forty, and burning with a simmering rage. 

She's on her third beer when a woman whose face she only knows from film reels settles onto the barstool next to her. 

"Hello, Technician Barnes." 

Becca doesn't glance over, just picks up her beer and drains the bottle in one smooth, swift motion. "War's over, Agent Carter. You can just call me Becca now." 

"It's Peggy, then," the woman says, before turning to the bartender. "I'll have a whisky, dry, and another of what she's having." 

"I can pay for my own drink," Becca says, and it comes out sharper than intended. Becca wonders, briefly, if this is a sort of futile frustration, a misplaced loyalty but Bucky's letters spoke fondly of Agent Carter, if at all, and life is always more complicated than it looks in the film reels. 

But the truth of it is this: it's hard to look at Peggy Carter and not see the war. Hard to look at her and not see what she represents -- Captain America and the Howling Commandos, a war-time myth that's grown larger than the telling only it's not a myth, not really, it was just a bunch of boys and this woman right here sitting next to her, cutting a swath through Europe, through the Nazis, leaving blood and hope and fire in their wake. 

"And how have you found peacetime, Becca? I trust you've found work." 

Becca works at picking the label off her beer bottle, nail scratching along the surface where damp paper meets glass. She is the very picture of surliness, she knows, because this mood, this bout of self-reflection and melancholy, it's the only true thing that she and Bucky ever really got from their father and Ma wouldn't be proud of her acting like this but then again, maybe Becca's moodiness would be the least of Ma's problems if she were still alive. 

She's got a job sorting mail at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. It's nothing glamorous and it barely pays but Becca's not kidding herself anymore; she knows that by herself, it could be years and years before she could ever make enough to support Ethel and Miriam. They're better off in Indiana, for all that it makes her chest ache to think that they will grow up barely remembering the faces of the family that first bore them into this world. 

It's nothing compared to the kind of work, the kind of responsibility, that she'd grown used to with the WAC but she's not about to go around admitting that out loud. Shame settles like a stone in her gut when she finds herself feeling grateful for the opportunities the war brought her -- how could she be, when it tore away everything else? 

"Working for the local paper right now, I guess," Becca admits at last. "But honestly, I was thinking of going back to school. Going to college, maybe." 

"There's a new organization. It's a peace-time extension of the SSR, I suppose, we're still ironing out the details. We're not even sure what we're going to call it just yet but I've been requested by Mister Stark to help found it." 

"And?"

"And your brother always spoke highly of you, Becca. As does your WAC record. It would be good to have more competent women around the office. Sooner or later, there will be enough of us that they can't keep insisting that I'm the exception, not the rule." 

Only now does Becca dare to glance over, to really let herself take in the sight of Peggy Carter. She's beautiful, intimidatingly so, with an attitude towards life that strikes just the right balance between unflinchingly straightforward and unsettlingly kind. It's easy to see why Steve fell for her. 

What is also not hard to see are the shadows under her eyes that speak of many nights of lost sleep and the lines around her mouth that spell out a familiar kind of sadness, one that Becca is used to seeing in her own mirror every morning. 

"I meant it when I said the war is over," Becca says, not unkindly. "It's taken too much from me and I won't seek it out, not now. If that's all you came here for, then I won't keep you." 

"That _was_ all I came here for," Peggy says, saluting the bartender with her empty glass before turning to Becca with the sort of intent that suits this bar better than her cool, professional demeanor, "but now that I'm here, I suppose I've found a few reasons to stay a little longer." 

. 

Grief is a terrible reason to go to bed with someone, probably, but when Peggy presses Becca against the inside of her front door, wood splinters catching on the thin fabric of Becca's dress and slim fingers digging into hips, victory-red lips leaving marks up and down Becca's neck, she starts to understand the appeal. It is less about grief, perhaps, than it is about an exorcism of desire, about two kindred spirits only meant to meet once or twice before setting off on different paths, never to return. 

There's a joke to be made here, something like _queer runs in the family, I guess_ , but it's in poor taste and anyways, between Brooklyn and the WAC, Becca made peace with this part of herself a long time ago. 

The war brought them together, inexorably, far from the Philippines, far from Peggy Carter's native England but the war is not over for this devastating woman shaking apart in Becca's arms because Peggy Carter has battle-born written into every inch of her body, from the sweep of her eyebrows to her steady hands to that determined march in her step. 

The only other person Becca has ever known who wore war so well, so easily, was Steve. 

It is a fate that Becca would not wish on anyone, and so for now, for tonight, she will have to be enough to hold them both together. 

. 

The trouble with war is this: her country just can't seem to stop falling headlong into it. 

Someone's gotta speak up about it. 

If not her, then who?

. 

"Who's this one, then?"

"Some journalist from a local paper. The Brooklyn Eagle, maybe? Rebecca Barnes." 

"Jesus, you don't think she's _that_ Barnes, do you?"

"She is _that_ Barnes and she's standing right in front of you, both ears in working order, thanks," Becca says, one fist gripped tight around the wooden handle of a sign, proudly declaring **I WANT OUT OF VIETNAM**. 

The cop looks her up and down, a sneer fixed permanently on his face. "Don't think this is the kind of shit your brother died for, huh?" 

There's a hard crack, sudden and fast, her fist meeting his face before she ever really got the chance to think about it, her entire world narrowed down to this moment, the dirty precinct and the cop clutching at his jaw, howling in agony but she can't hear it, there's no sound outside of the blood rushing in her ears. 

It's not a surprise when, ten hours later, she makes bail to the sound of a sharp clicking of heels down the linoleum corridor, her freedom bought off by a smart bun and a familiar English accent. 

Peggy looks -- looks the same and yet completely different, with a weight on her back the likes of which Becca has never seen and streaks of grey in her dark brown hair that take Becca by surprise, even as she smooths back her own strands of grey. 

In her memories, Peggy is always the same, always young. It's strange to realize how the years have passed them by. 

"You told me once that the war was over for you, correct?" Peggy says. Together, they blink up at the early morning light, letting the haze of sunrise in New York wrap itself around them. "Do you still feel that way?" 

Becca digs her hands in her pockets and shrugs up her shoulders, as if it was possible for her to burrow completely into her heavy winter coat. 

She's made a reputation for herself -- not always a nice one, sure, but one that she's proud of. She's got an ex-husband and an apartment empty except for the lone cat that deigns to put up with her. There's a woman in her department at the paper, a photographer, and they've been making a slow, inevitable circle around each other that Becca is more than happy to wait it out. She's gotten more patient with age; she understands that sometimes you have to take a while to get to the best parts. 

Miriam comes up from her home in New Jersey every other Saturday and they have lunch, managing somehow to talk about everything in the world except for the things that really matter. 

Ethel, still far away in Indiana, she hears from even less. 

It is not perfect but Becca finds that she wouldn't trade it for the world. She loves what she does. 

The other day, her boss pulled her into his office and said if she gets lucky, if the right pieces fall into place, they might even send her to West Germany some time soon, ask her to write a piece on the Wall. 

What good is a quiet life compared to that? 

"I guess maybe I just found myself on another side of it, Peggy," Becca says. 

Peggy hums, nodding like that's exactly the response she was expecting and who knows, maybe it was. Peggy leans in, slipping her hand into Becca's for a brief moment, a warm touch of skin to skin, before pushing away and walking down the street. 

Becca feels the weight of paper in her hand and holds the slim card up, bringing it into the light.

  
**MARGARET CARTER, SHIELD DIRECTOR  
917 - 407 - 4419**   


Becca can't help it. She laughs.

"Looks like you thought of a name after all, huh, Director Carter." 

. 

Becca hops a cab and then a plane and then another plane and the second she makes it through her front door in Red Hook, she rushes to her desk and pulls out the card that Peggy left with her not so long ago, one hand already grasping for the telephone. 

She dials the number with shaking fingers, exhaling with a shudder. 

"You've reached the office of Director Carter, if you have an urgent message, please leave it now or else call back later." 

Becca returns the phone to its cradle with a slam, sinking into the wall behind her as she presses a hand over her rapidly beating heart. It is a sign, she knows, a message from a higher power telling her, "not this time." Telling her, "you were mistaken."

It was a trick of the light or maybe, perhaps more accurately, it was the wild, fleeting hope of a little girl, a fervency of spirit that can only really survive within the young, within a younger sister who never quite gave up on her big brother coming home. 

It is 1970 and Bucky has been dead for twenty-six years. 

. 

Her hair is full of grey, now, and her vision isn't half as good she'd like to tell herself, and so Becca has to reach for her glasses to be sure, has to press up close to the screen, hands braced against the wooden frame, to tell herself that she has not lost her mind, that what she is seeing is true. 

There is a man on her television, a man in black, a man with a gun and he walks just like that man in West Berlin all those years ago, with a weight to his walk that she'd know anywhere. 

Becca reaches for the phone but it is far too late for a phone call to Peggy to do any good. 

. 

It is 2014 and the man known as the Winter Soldier sneaks through her kitchen window, quiet as anything, the only noise to give him away a small, soft shuffle of feet against tile that she has to strain to hear. 

Becca's hands shake but she doesn't drop her cup of tea and that in and of itself is a point of pride these days, the sort of victory that she doesn't take lightly anymore in her old age. 

"Hey, Becca-Girl." 

She waits for him to come to her this time, waits for him to fold her frail, smaller body into his arms and pick her up, feet barely touching the floor as he sweeps her around the expanse of her kitchen, just like he did so many years ago. 

"You all grown up and too important for your big brother?" 

Becca buries her face into his neck, safe in the knowledge that there is no shame in the tears streaking down her face because it is impossible to tell where her tears end and his begin. 

"You dummy, I always was." 

"And don't you know, Becca-Girl, I still missed ya more than anything." 

It is 2014 and her brother finally, _finally_ came home.


End file.
